I get to choose what I carry with my on this journey called life. I can ‘travel heavy’, burdened down by past regrets, choices, experiences, or, I can choose to accept this moment right now is all I have. What do I choose to fill it with?

I do not want to be consumed by fear, holding onto regret, clutching desperately to the past believing it will be my future. I have a choice. To hold on to what doesn’t work for me anymore, or let it go and fill each moment with love.

It is my choice. To believe in Love or give into fear. And if I fall, or forget, or buy into fear, it is my choice to choose Love again and again, always.

2. We are not alone.

We all have experiences in the past that have hurt us, caused us to falter, to stumble on our journey. And while my experience may be unique to me, and yours to you, we all share in this human experience. We are not alone on this human path.

When we risk telling our stories of pain and expressing our fears, we make room for others, including ourselves, to see into our hearts. When we choose to look into the heart of what makes us build walls to keep others out or push back against those who want to know us deeply or dig ourselves into corners and hide in darkened rooms, we create the possibility of light shining through, illuminating even the darkest corners of our fears.

When the light shines through its easier to see, we are not alone. There have been others in the darkness with us, yearning for the light too. And beyond the darkness, we can see those standing in the light reaching in to help us out.

3. I can choose to be Right or Happy. It is my choice.

The need to ‘be right’ is seductive. It convinces us that if we hold onto it, we will never be hurt, or disappointed, let down or feel out of control.

The challenge is, being right means someone else has to be wrong. And in that space, true intimacy, the one that is spelled “In-to-me-see” cannot happen. And without intimacy with those closest to us, we feel unseen, unheard, unknown, and disconnected.

We are human beings. We are hard-wired for connection. We can’t connect with others when we hold onto our need to be right.

Choosing to ‘be happy’ invites us into that beautiful space where there is room for others, along with ourselves, to feel seen, heard, known and connected. It doesn’t mean we have to agree with other’s points of view, it just invites us into that space where other points of view are different, not wrong. And that’s okay.

Being in the Choices Seminars room these past five days has reminded me of my power to live each day with a loving heart and open mind.

It has renewed my commitment to walk my path believing in my worthiness and my capacity to create passion, delight and kindness all around me.

It has reminded me that we are all beautiful human beings sharing this space called Planet Earth, taking this journey together. We may live on separate continents, different towns and cities, but we all share in this human condition. And when we choose Love, we create greater possibility for peace to happen, miracles to appear and Love to blossom in every heart.

None of us are powerful enough to change another, but we can choose to change how we see ourselves and our capacity to create better in our world.

When we focus on how we are in the world, and look into our own hearts, we make space for others to share their heart’s desires too. In that sharing, we create opportunities to connect through Love so that hate and terror and war and abuse and a host of other human conditions that are hurting us, can be exposed and healed in the light of love.

The demands of work, of striving to find balance in my world called for me to find my centre in the busy-ness of all that is around me.

Coaching at Choices is a volunteer activity. I choose to do it for the benefits of being part of experiencing the joy people feel when they open their eyes to the true wonder and beauty of who they are at their core.

Giving is Receiving and in the Choices Seminar room I receive the beauty of miracles all around.

It is a room where miracles are visible. They are visible in the broken hearts healing deep pains that have bound them up in confusion, disappointment, disillusionment and grief. In the wounded spirits freeing themselves from the darkness of the past to stand tall and proud in the light. In the silenced voices finding the courage to speak their truth.

For eleven years, I have volunteered my time to support others on their journey through the Seminar. For eleven years, I have been given the gift of continuous support on my journey of becoming all that I am when I let go of believing the lies I tell myself about why I need to play small in a great big world of possibility.

Eleven years ago, when I walked into the Seminar room, I didn’t really think I needed to be there. I had just spent three years deep-diving into healing from the pain of a relationship that had almost killed me. My book, The Dandelion Spirit, had just been published. I had a new job in the homeless serving sector, and I was writing and producing a documentary on The Young Canadians of the Calgary Stampede for Global TV. My daughters and I were reunited, healing the wounds of the past. My world was turning up aces! I didn’t need some self-help mumbo-jumbo to help me live better. I was doing great.

We don’t know what we don’t know. We cannot find new paths until we stop walking the old one’s.

Choices, I discovered, wasn’t about what Idid in the world. It was about learning simple, yet powerful ways to do what I choose to do — with heart, compassion, passion and integrity – no matter how dark, bumpy, lumpy, crooked or straight, smooth or light-filled my path.

Everything might have been going great, but if better is possible, why not go for the greatness of being fully alive, free of self-defeating games and limiting beliefs that would have me stumble whenever life’s curve balls took a swing at me?

My awakening didn’t happen all at once in the room. It happened slowly, over time, as I began to use the simple tools I was given in the room that would have a profound difference on my life and the world around me.

Like being courageous — to speak up when all I wanted to do was retreat. To step into conflict when all I could think about was hiding. To stay true to my values, my beliefs, my right to be heard when my habit was to smile and pretend everything was okay in the face of everything not being alright.

Choices isn’t a magic pill. It is a profoundly moving and shifting experience that provides simple tools and practices to live life outside your comfort zones. In Choices, you’re not told how to live. You’re provided a loving space to look at yourself and see where what you are doing is, or is not, working for you anymore. And in that space, to make your own decision and choices to create the life you choose to live.

Life is a journey best taken in Love.

In the Choices Room, I am grateful I get to walk beside people as they fall in love with the person they spend their whole lives with, themselves.

Consciously choose to give Love away today. No matter where you are, what you’re doing, consciously decide to let Love be your answer and choose the most loving path, no matter what.

And yes, I know it can be hard.

Habits, patterns of behaviour built up over the years, accustomed responses can all get in the way of our capacity to respond through Love, not Fear. Not Anger. Not Confusion.

Watch yourself.

Check out how you are responding in certain circumstances and in those instances where your behaviour is causing you angst or causing someone else harm, ask yourself, “Is this an habitual way of responding in moments of stress, discord, confusion? What’s with that?”

Don’t fall into the trap of asking, “Why?” Ask instead, ‘What?”

“What’s compelling me to respond/behave this way?” “What’s my motivation for ____________ (fill in the blank, i.e. yelling at my kids, shutting down when someone disagrees with me, staying silent when someone talks down to me…)

I’ll let you in on a secret. ‘Why?’ is the question we ask that let’s us off the hook of getting accountable. Why keeps us spiraling in trying to find answers to questions we don’t really want to know the answers to.

Remember as a child when an adult asked, after you’d done something that wasn’t really all that positive or constructive, or was nonsensical, “Why do you always……?” or, “Why can’t you…..?”

And, because we thought there really was a ‘deeper’ why to our behaviour, (that’s often what we were told as children) we developed strategies that either, prevented us getting into ‘trouble’ or constantly got us into ‘trouble’.

Those habits were developed at a time when we couldn’t make sense of the world around us. Back then, they may have served to protect us from having to answer the ‘why’s’ of the ways we were that we didn’t really understand, but today, they do not always serve us well. They often prevent us from getting, giving, sharing and expressing Love — without expectation or conditions.

This week, in the Choices seminar room, over 50 people will gather to learn ways to fall in love with themselves without fear blocking their path home to their hearts.

There are many courses, books, therapists out there who can make a difference in how you know, express and act out in Love.

For me, Choices was the gift that gave me simple, practical and workable tools to create room for me to get out of my own way so that I could come home to my heart without fearing my heart was not a safe place for me to be. In the process, I have fallen in Love with being in Love with me and the world around me. I have learned to seek the joy in this moment, to see the beauty all around and to share Love in everything I do.

Try it. You might just fall in Love all over again with the one you were born to Love forever. You.

Namaste.

__________________

On March 21st, 2016 I made a commitment to share an Act of Grace a week for 52 weeks. Along the way I’ve missed a week and always, I have carried on, creating Acts of Grace until this week when I have completed my vision of creating 52 Acts of Grace.

Thank you to everyone who has chimed in, shared, commented and been part of this journey.

I am so blessed. Grateful. Joyful.

As a FYI — this is the second time I’ve shared the Act of Grace: Give Love Away. (The first was Week 14, June 20, 2016, HERE)

It is always worth repeating. Always worth reminding ourselves we have a choice. No matter the circumstances, between every action and reaction/response, there is always a millisecond of choice where we can choose Love over Fear.

To access all 52 Acts of Grace, click HERE. The PDF will download with links to each Act of Grace in the weekly compilation.

Life is filled with crossroads, intersections, moments of choice. Which way to go? What to do next? Where to stop? Where to begin again?

For the next five days my choices have narrowed down to three very simple rules to follow: Love the people. Love the people. Love the people.

I am off to coach at Choices for the next five days. Off to be part of hearts breaking open to beat fearlessly, minds setting themselves free of the past, lives opening up to possibility.

Coaching at Choices is always a good reminder for me to get present, get conscious, get compassionate.

It is an opportunity to be mindful of my actions, thoughts and words so that I bring my willingness to serve and be present for another into each moment. As a coach, my role is to hold the space for each trainee to trust themselves enough to know, their answers are not ‘out there’, they are inside their hearts. Inside their own knowing of what works, and doesn’t work in their lives. As a coach, I don’t have someone else’s answers. I only have good questions. The answers are theirs.

It is one of the many things I love about being in the Choices room. We are all so unique, different, complex individuals, yet, singular in our humanity.

We think. We feel. We know things. We see things. We understand things.

We act. We speak. We do and say things we mean. We do and say things we regret.

We carry our hurts, bury our pain, avoid our fears.

We laugh, we cry, we weep, we dance for joy.

We do all these things and still, we struggle to find the path to living fearlessly in the now.

We look at the past, wishing it could be different, wishing we can have it back.

We look at the future, fearing it won’t be different, fearing it will be the same.

And in this moment right now, we all have the power to change our minds and hearts to feel and see and know differently what happened in the past, and what is possible in the future.

In this moment right now, we all have the capacity to love fearlessly, live wildly beyond our wildest imaginings.

Tomorrow, I will step into the seminar room for five days of living and loving fearlessly.

Tomorrow, I will step into a circle of people who believe to change the world, we must first begin with our own hearts. In that space, we create a world of possibility for everyone.

Today, I am grateful. Excited. At peace. I am present, willing to do my part to change the world one heart at a timeby living my life fearlessly, lovingly and compassionately, breath by breath. I am willing to serve and give my best to this moment right now so that my ripple can flow out into the world around me, in Love.

Like this:

I am walking out of the building where I work to go next door to the convenience store for a bottle of Pellegrino. A tall man walks towards me, smiles. I smile back. I don’t want to make assumptions, but I think it is possible he is homeless.

He stops and says, “Excuse me…”

I stop and turn to look at him. “Yes?”

“I don’t want money” he says immediately. “But, I’m kinda stuck here. I just got out of emergency and I’m really hungry.” And he shows me the cut on his foot. “Would you be able to help me out with lunch?”

I look at him. Consider my options and say, “I could buy you some lunch here.” And I point to the little take-out restaurant on the other side of our office doors.

“I’d rather go to Mac’s,” he says.

“I don’t have time to go to Mac’s,” I tell him. “I’ll gladly buy you lunch right here.”

He considers it for a moment, thanks me and we walk into the restaurant where he orders lunch.

As we wait for the server to tally up the bill, I ask him if he has a place to stay.

“I’m kinda couch-surfing right now,” he tells me.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Hobbema or as I call it, Hellbema.” He laughs. Shrugs a shoulder. “I don’t like it there.”

“I know a number of people from Maskwachees,” I tell him, using the Indigenous name. “They are working very hard to create positive change.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But all my people there, they just judge me. Make me feel bad about myself.”

“Do you feel bad about yourself?” I ask.

Again, a nervous laugh. A shrug of the shoulder. “Yeah. Pretty well all the time. Life’s not easy.”

“I would have to say that for your people it has been very, very hard.”

He nods his head up and down. Looks me in the eyes. “You’re a good lady.” And he leans over and gives me an awkward, sideways hug.

I return the hug.

“How come you know people from Maskwachees?”

“I’m involved in a program called Choices,” I tell him. “I’ve met them through it.”

His face lights up. “Hey! My cousin went to Choices. When he came back, all he wanted to do was hug everybody! He loved it.”

This time, he gives me a full on hug. Laughing as he does so.

Laughing, I hug him back.

The server has my bill ready. I pay. I wish him well and tell him he could check with his band about going to Choices. “It might help you feel less bad about yourself.”

“I’d have to go back. I don’t want to go back there.”

“Sometimes, going back is the only place to find the way forward,” I reply.

He nods his head, side to side as if weighing my words.

I tell him I have to go. He thanks me for lunch and as I’m about to open the door to leave he calls out, “Hey wait! Don’t forget. We gotta hug!”

And I turn and we hug and I leave. I go to the convenience store next door to buy my Pellegrino and he waits for his lunch.

And life flows onward.

And both of us move on carrying the memory of a hug where our paths intersected.

Fear lives in my belly. It is that grumbly, rumbly, churning feeling of disquiet that eats away at my peace of mind. When I give into it.

Love lives in my entire being. It is that warm, soothing, tranquil feeling of quiet joy bubbling up to embrace my peace of mind. When I give into it.

Which one will I choose? It is up to me.

I can’t try to ‘be fearful’. I am or I’m not.

Yoda said it best.

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

Which will you choose today?

To take the path to the dark side, or to keep walking the path into the light?

Will you allow your fearful thoughts to drag you down, or will you allow loving kindness to lift you up and draw you out of the darkness and hold you in the light?

It is your choice.

On the weekend at Choices Seminars, I had a moment of fear wash over me. I’d made a mistake in how I presented something to the group, and my mind went into hyper-active defensive mode when I heard my co-facilitator point out to me how stupid and unprofessional I was.

Now — here’s the thing. That is not what my co-facilitator said. All they really did was provide me some constructive feedback on how to do it better next time.

In my fear of making mistakes, of looking stupid in front of the group, of being shamed for not doing it right, my fear heard their feedback totally out of context to what they said.

In the moment, my fear rose up and heard condemnation. In the moment, my fear drove me away from courage and truth into the darkness of criticism.

I’d like to tell you I recovered right there on the spot. 🙂 Truth is, as soon as I could gracefully do so without drawing attention to myself, (which was at the first break) I left the room and went to the washroom, had a little pity party and then pulled myself together. When the session resumed, I stood in front of the group and continued.

And here’s the thing about those moments.

It was a breakthrough. A moment of such deep clarity and light I could not avoid the truth that came spilling up out of me as all night long I worried over and thought through the events of that evening trying to discern why my reaction to such a simple moment had been so visceral, so immediate, so violent.

The next morning, I awoke, tired yet really clear on what that moment of feeling shame at the front of the room represented. And in my enlightenment, the sun broke through the darkness and light illuminated my path in all its brilliant clarity.

Since a small, small girl I had held a belief within me that is not true. I didn’t even know the belief was there until such an insignificant moment erupted into a deep dive into truth and the ‘belief that is a lie’ rose to the top and screamed in my face and, I swear, felt like it was ripping my heart out.

I won’t go into the details of the ‘belief that is a lie’, I still have a lot of processing to do on it. I will tell you though that I am celebrating. I am dancing. I am shouting for joy. This ‘belief that is a lie’ has caused me a lot of pain, confusion and harm. On some deep subconscious level I have always been aware of its presence, lurking in the darkness, disturbing my status quo and jeopardizing my capacity to feel and know pure joy.

Now that I see it. Now that I know it. Now that I can face it, I can deal with it.

I am grateful.

I cannot heal or change what I do not acknowledge.

I acknowledge that the ‘belief that is a lie’ does not serve me well. It does not bring me the ‘more’ of what I want in my life.

Today, I choose to step boldly, confidently and joyfully onto the path of light, love and well-being.